false
Genuine Lies by Nora Roberts
BUY IT NEW
- $7.99 Online price$7.19 Member price(Save 10%)Limited Time Offer! Everyone receives the Member Price on books.
See Details
- Add To List uiAction=GetAllLists&page=List&pageType=list&ean=9780553290783&productCode=BK&maxCount=100&threshold=3
DELIVERY & GIFT DETAILS:
Usually ships within 24 hours
Delivery Time and Shipping Rates
Eligible for gift wrap & gift message.
Reserve it at BN.com & pick it up in 60 minutes at your local store.
Enter a zip code
(Mass Market Paperback - Reprint)
- Pub. Date: May 1999
- 521pp
- Sales Rank: 15,800
Reader Rating: (24 ratings)
Detailed Rating: "Originality" See All
| More Formats | |
|---|---|
| Available in eBook | $7.99 |
| Paperback - Reprint | $12.00 |
Buy it Used: 559 copies from $1.99 See All Available
Customers who bought this also bought
Product Details
- Pub. Date: May 1999
- Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
- Format: Mass Market Paperback, 521pp
- Sales Rank: 15,800
- ISBN-13: 9780553290783
- ISBN: 0553290789
- Edition Description: Reprint
Synopsis
A book to die for...
Eve Benedict is the last of the movie goddesses, a smoky-voiced sex symbol with two Oscars, four ex-husbands, and a legion of lovers to her name. There is no secret, no scandal she doesn't know. Now Eve has decided to write her memoirs--no holds barred. All Hollywood begs her not to. But Eve has her reasons....
Julia Summers is the biographer Eve has handpicked to tell her story. Transported from her quiet life in Connecticut to glitzy Beverly Hills, Julia hates the limelight but loves her work--and the home it built for the ten-year-old son she's raising alone. How can she refuse this chance of a lifetime?
But Eve's elegantly sexy stepson, Paul Winthrop, will challenge Eve's determination to tell her story--and Julia's resolve to guard her heart. And as Julia learns just how far Eve's enemies will go to keep her book from publication, she also discovers that Eve has one last, dark secret to share. It is one that will change Julia's life--and could cut it brutally short.
Publishers Weekly
Though the opening scene of this book refers to a murder, that deed only occurs 100 pages from the end of the story, when Roberts's ( Public Secrets ) disappointing tale finally heats up. Until then, the reader is dragged through the sordid secrets of a dreary collection of friends, lovers, employees and ex-husbands of 67-year-old film star Eve Benedict. She has hired Julia Summers to write an authorized biography, an expose of Hollywood life guaranteed to irk most of her past associates. And soon an aggressor swings into action: Eve and Julia receive threatening notes; Julia's rooms are broken into twice; finally, Eve is silenced permanently. So whodunit? The suspects are legion: Eve's nephew and agent, Drake Morrison, now fired and disinherited; former lover Michael Delrickio, whose mob connections Eve planned to reveal; actress Gloria DuBarry, a symbol of morality--provided no one learns of her affair and abortion. Or maybe it was Eva's devoted supporters Nina Soloman and Dorothy Travers, who are more than just staff. Or Eve's stepson, mystery writer Paul Winthrop, who has a marked interest in Julia. Or, as the police think, Julia herself. (Sept.)
More Reviews and RecommendationsBiography
One of the most prolific and popular writers in the world, Nora Roberts (who also writes as her edgier alter-ego J. D. Robb) publishes multiple books a year. Not that it’s enough for her fans, who tear through her unconventional romances. With her trademark mix of fantasy, mystery, and romance, Roberts has created her own genre -- and romance fans are grateful for it!
More About the AuthorCustomer Reviews
- Reader Rating:
- Ratings: 24Reviews: 10
- See All Reviews
One of Nora Robert's BEST!!by Anonymous
Reader Rating:
See Detailed Ratings
November 23, 2009: I have this book in my collection. Over the years i have read this book several times. It is amazingly thrilling,romantic,mysterious,and has just the right amount of humor. This book is addictive and I highly recommend it!!
A good readby Anonymous
Reader Rating:
See Detailed Ratings
July 12, 2008: It was entertaining and the possibilites of who done it was great.
Fact File
Name:
Nora Roberts
Also Known As:
J. D. Robb; Sarah Hardesty; Jill March; Eleanor Marie Robertson (birth name)
Current Home:
Keedysville, Maryland
Date of Birth:
1950
Place of Birth:
Silver Spring, Maryland
Awards:
Romance Writers of America Hall of Fame, 1986; Romantic Times Career Achievement Award, 1991; Romance Writers of America Centennial Award, 1997; Romance Writers of America Golden Medallion Award (seven times); Quill Award for Blue Smoke, 2006
Biography
Not only has Nora Roberts written more bestsellers than anyone else in the world (according to Publishers Weekly), she’s also created a hybrid genre of her own: the futuristic detective romance. And that’s on top of mastering every subgenre in the romance pie: the family saga, the historical, the suspense novel. But this most prolific and versatile of authors might never have tapped into her native talent if it hadn't been for one fateful snowstorm.
As her fans well know, in 1979 a blizzard trapped Roberts at home for a week with two bored little kids and a dwindling supply of chocolate. To maintain her sanity, Roberts started scribbling a story -- a romance novel like the Harlequin paperbacks she'd recently begun reading. The resulting manuscript was rejected by Harlequin, but that didn't matter to Roberts. She was hooked on writing. Several rejected manuscripts later, her first book was accepted for publication by Silhouette.
For several years, Roberts wrote category romances for Silhouette -- short books written to the publisher's specifications for length, subject matter and style, and marketed as part of a series of similar books. Roberts has said she never found the form restrictive. "If you write in category, you write knowing there's a framework, there are reader expectations," she explained. "If this doesn't suit you, you shouldn't write it. I don't believe for one moment you can write well what you wouldn't read for pleasure."
Roberts never violated the reader's expectations, but she did show a gift for bringing something fresh to the romance formula. Her first book, Irish Thoroughbred (1981), had as its heroine a strong-willed horse groom, in contrast to the fluttering young nurses and secretaries who populated most romances at the time. But Roberts's books didn't make significant waves until 1985, when she published Playing the Odds, which introduced the MacGregor clan. It was the first bestseller of many.
Roberts soon made a name for herself as a writer of spellbinding multigenerational sagas, creating families like the Scottish MacGregors, the Irish Donovans and the Ukrainian Stanislaskis. She also began working on romantic suspense novels, in which the love story unfolds beneath a looming threat of violence or disaster. She grew so prolific that she outstripped her publishers' ability to print and market Nora Roberts books, so she created an alter ego, J.D. Robb. Under the pseudonym, she began writing romantic detective novels set in the future. By then, millions of readers had discovered what Publishers Weekly called her "immeasurable diversity and talent."
Although the style and substance of her books has grown, Roberts remains loyal to the genre that launched her career. As she says, "The romance novel at its core celebrates that rush of emotions you have when you are falling in love, and it's a lovely thing to relive those feelings through a book."
Good to Know
Roberts still lives in the same Maryland house she occupied when she first started writing -- though her carpenter husband has built on some additions. She and her husband also own Turn the Page Bookstore Café in Boonsboro, Maryland. When Roberts isn't busy writing, she likes to drop by the store, which specializes in Civil War titles as well as autographed copies of her own books.
Roberts sued fellow writer Janet Dailey in 1997, accusing her of plagiarizing numerous passages of her work over a period of years. Dailey paid a settlement and publicly apologized, blaming stress and a psychological disorder for her misconduct.
Feature Interview
Excerpted from the March/April 2002 issue of Book magazine.One afternoon when Nora Roberts was four, her two oldest brothers broke into a violent argument while they were baby-sitting her. "I peeked out of the bedroom, and they're beating the hell out of each other," Roberts says. Then her mother walked in, with a grocery bag in each hand. "One bag goes here, one bag goes there, she steps right in the middle of these two six-foot guys and she goes, boom, bam. Two backhands. And both of them go, 'Maaaaaawwwmm.' I thought right then, There's the power. She's the power."
Elly, as her family still calls her, the youngest of five and the only girl, was a quick study. "She bossed her brothers around," says her mother, Eleanor; today, "her brothers have got her on a throne." Roberts reigns over more than her family, which now includes her husband and two sons. Since her writing debut in 1981, she has helped lead American romance away from its clichés of simpering heroines and heroic rapists toward more complex characters and contemporary, multifaceted plots. Of course, sex -- passionate, tender, delayed, avoided, forced, in castles, in fields, in treetops -- continues to be a central hook. And often, the prose remains purple; Roberts herself has a propensity for phrases like "she rocked them both toward madness." But the genre with which her name is synonymous is one -- the only one -- that always puts women at the center of the universe.
***
Two Mercedes -- a Kompressor convertible and an M-Class SUV -- and a Chrysler PT Cruiser are parked outside the rural Keedysville, Maryland, home Roberts shares with her husband. Inside, several gauzy photographs of nude models hang above the bed in the ground-floor master bedroom, and a rendition of the Casablanca movie poster -- with the couple painted in as Ilsa and Rick -- is prominent above the fireplace. Three ebullient dogs and one gnarled old mutt track in dirt and litter the house with deer bones that they've found outside.
Since moving here twenty-nine years ago, Roberts has divorced her first husband, raised their two sons (Dan, now twenty-nine, lives with his wife down the lane; Jason, twenty-six, is just over an hour away) and remarried. She has also added on a few rooms and an indoor pool; a few years ago, she bought twenty adjoining acres so she could continue to shoo deer out of the garden in her underwear without worrying about neighbors. She and her husband own a tiny bookshop in nearby Boonsboro, but Roberts spends most of her time in an upstairs office where she types, smokes and drinks diet colas eight hours a day, five days a week. It's a routine that's produced an average of seven books a year since 1981, many of them bestsellers.
Roberts knows that her work is commercial fiction and doesn't lose any sleep waiting for National Book Award nominations. The high-art literary tradition isn't what's gotten her to where she is; what has is her "real talent for storytelling," as author Jennifer Crusie (Fast Women; Welcome to Temptation) says, and a commensurate skill with plot and pacing. Readers are pulled into her story lines (which often bounce from one continent to the next) and her well-drawn characters. Fans especially admire Roberts' tough, independent heroines. "When they fit with your own circumstances," says Elizabeth Mayfield, a database administrator from Norwalk, Connecticut, "you think, Gee, there's hope for me." Roberts, however, contends that she's not writing to provide role models for anyone. "I'm gonna tell a good, entertaining story," she says. "I'm not looking to change the world."
Roberts was born Eleanor Marie Robertson, and she grew up in Silver Spring, Maryland, about an hour from where she lives now. Her father worked as a projectionist at the local movie theater and as a stagehand until 1964, when he started a lighting company -- which is where most of the Robertson family still works. Her mother ran the family. "Mom was a very strict disciplinarian," says Roberts' brother Buzz, who is now the president of his dad's company, "but as long as you followed the rules and were polite, you didn't have a problem." He says Nora had it a little easier than her brothers. "Us boys, we knew we were low men on the totem pole. Mom was tickled pink when she had Nora."
"Her daddy worked two jobs all his life, and during the Depression, I took in roomers," says Eleanor Robertson, who at eighty-five still lives in Silver Spring and is now secretary-treasurer of the company her husband started (Bernie Robertson died in 2000). "She knows how hard we worked to give them an education and a nice home." Roberts went to Catholic schools as a child and credits much of her success to the nuns who taught her -- the discipline and guilt in her formative years did her a lot of good.
In her sophomore year of high school, Roberts transferred to public school, where she met Ronald Aufdem-Brinke; she married him at seventeen, in 1968, right after graduation. The young couple moved to Keedysville and had a small house built in the woods. While Aufdem-Brinke worked at his father's sheet-metal business and later the Robertson lighting company, Roberts took care of their two children and the house. "Oh God, I had craft addictions," Roberts says, taking a drag on a cigarette. (She runs through a pack of Winstons at a pace that doesn't quite catch up to chain-smoking but runs several steps beyond casual.) "You name it, I made it. I macraméd two hammocks once. I did ceramics, I sewed the kids' clothes. I even put flies into overalls -- that is sick. I was a sick woman. I baked bread once a week. I canned jellies and made my own spaghetti sauce using my own tomatoes."
Sometime during the next decade (she calls the period her "Earth Mother" years), Roberts started to read Harlequin novels -- the short books were easy for her to finish while the kids were napping. During a blizzard in 1979, trapped inside with little more than her three- and six-year-old sons and a game of Candy Land, Roberts sat down with a pencil and wrote a manuscript of her own, a romance that she's since described as "very bad." In the next year and a half, while her kids were napping or at T-ball practice, she wrote at least six manuscripts in longhand. She submitted some of them to Harlequin, which at the time was using mainly British writers. Roberts didn't hear back, but her enthusiasm wasn't subdued. "I became a writing junkie," she says. Although she was rejected several times, she continued to write -- but started filing her manuscripts in a back drawer rather than submitting them.
Roberts then heard that a new romance publisher, Silhouette, was looking specifically for American writers, so she sent in her work. In 1980 she got a call from Nancy Jackson, a Silhouette editor, saying she had plucked one of Roberts' manuscripts -- Irish Thoroughbred, a slender love story about an Irish stable hand and her boss -- out of the slush pile. Jackson told Roberts she wanted to publish it. Eleanor Aufdem-Brinke changed her name to Nora Roberts because she says she assumed all romance authors used a nom de plume. The book "didn't make waves when it first came out," says Isabel Swift, her current editor, but it sold well in reprint. Roberts was hooked on the process, though, and published five more books the following year, eight the following and ten the year after that.
Roberts hit it big in 1985 when she wrote the first of her MacGregor family series, Playing the Odds. The book, which focuses on a matchmaking Scottish patriarch and his brood, became an immediate bestseller. Romance readers began associating the name Nora Roberts with multigenerational sagas: In addition to the MacGregors, she has written about the Donovans, a modern family of Irish magicians; the Calhouns, a family of pigheaded sisters in Maine; and the Stanislaskis, tempestuous Ukrainian immigrants.
***
From the beginning, Roberts' heroines were not content to wear aprons or take dictation. In Irish Thoroughbred, though Roberts' heroine was young (early twenties) and virginal (well, she was a virgin), she was a horse groomer with an independent streak. Roberts wasn't alone in giving her female characters more authority in the workforce; other American romance authors -- like Jayne Ann Krentz, Sandra Brown and Elizabeth Lowell -- were doing the same. "I think one of the great things the American writer has brought to the romance novel," Krentz says, "is a modern interpretation of women's roles and women's values." Author Janet Evanovich adds, "The genre reflects the increased power and opportunity afforded today's women. We see more variety in the genre in terms of heroine age and occupation. And today's heroine is stronger, more self-reliant. Of course, Nora was always ahead of the pack. Her heroines were always strong."
Rebecca Sullivan, a heroine in Roberts' latest romantic suspense, Three Fates, is a quintessential Nora Roberts lead: She runs the family business (giving boat tours off the western coast of Ireland) and engineers the search for the family's lost treasure. Rebecca's a smart, capable lady with a sense of humor. In the course of the story, she falls in love with a computer expert who eventually marries her -- the book ends in Ireland with the assumption that the husband will help her with the business. "I'm not interested in telling stories about weak women," Roberts says. "Or if they're weak, I want to show how they grow and how they become strong. I'm not writing about Cinderella sitting waiting for her prince to come and take her away. She'll get out of it herself. The prince is a bonus, a completion, another element -- but it's not the answer to all of her problems."
***
Perched on a stool next to her kitchen counter, Roberts doesn't look like a purveyor of dreams. She could be any of a million women, taking a break from a million jobs, looking toward the end of a million days. Right now, her husband is outside, working in the yard before heading to town. Later on, he'll pick up groceries, and Nora will cook dinner; favorites are pasta with red sauce or Cajun chicken. Around 7:30, the two will retire for the evening, probably settling down for a while in front of the television -- it's Thursday, so they'll probably tune in for some of Friends or ER. And that's a typical end to a typical day for the world's most popular romance author. "I always wonder if they asked Agatha Christie if she was homicidal," Roberts says with a laugh. "I don't have a romantic lifestyle."
Still, she says, it's romance books she turns to when she wants to escape reality, so maybe the queen of the realm is, finally, one of its true citizens as well. Roberts, after all, spends her days holed up in her office, writing, researching and investigating the backgrounds for her books. She loves it, she says, but it's work. And when she's done, she's done. "When I read for pleasure," she says, "give me a story."
If today's romance is escapism, millions of its readers would argue that it is also girl-power between pastel covers: adventures that belong to characters who are at their strongest -- and sexiest -- because they are women. So Roberts essentially shrugs off the contempt reserved for romance novels as sexist and ignorant. Still, she recognizes that the genre carries a lot of baggage -- even she finds herself sneaking reads when she's out in public. A lot of the embarrassment, she says, has to do with the way the books look. "It's mostly hard for me when she's falling out of her dress, and he has his mouth on her tit," Roberts says, describing what she calls "nursing mother" covers. She taps her lighter against the counter and rolls her eyes. "To sit on an airplane and read that?"
From the Publisher
A book to die for...
Eve Benedict is the last of the movie goddesses, a smoky-voiced sex symbol with two Oscars, four ex-husbands, and a legion of lovers to her name. There is no secret, no scandal she doesn't know. Now Eve has decided to write her memoirs--no holds barred. All Hollywood begs her not to. But Eve has her reasons....
Julia Summers is the biographer Eve has handpicked to tell her story. Transported from her quiet life in Connecticut to glitzy Beverly Hills, Julia hates the limelight but loves her work--and the home it built for the ten-year-old son she's raising alone. How can she refuse this chance of a lifetime?
But Eve's elegantly sexy stepson, Paul Winthrop, will challenge Eve's determination to tell her story--and Julia's resolve to guard her heart. And as Julia learns just how far Eve's enemies will go to keep her book from publication, she also discovers that Eve has one last, dark secret to share. It is one that will change Julia's life--and could cut it brutally short.
Publishers Weekly
Though the opening scene of this book refers to a murder, that deed only occurs 100 pages from the end of the story, when Roberts's ( Public Secrets ) disappointing tale finally heats up. Until then, the reader is dragged through the sordid secrets of a dreary collection of friends, lovers, employees and ex-husbands of 67-year-old film star Eve Benedict. She has hired Julia Summers to write an authorized biography, an expose of Hollywood life guaranteed to irk most of her past associates. And soon an aggressor swings into action: Eve and Julia receive threatening notes; Julia's rooms are broken into twice; finally, Eve is silenced permanently. So whodunit? The suspects are legion: Eve's nephew and agent, Drake Morrison, now fired and disinherited; former lover Michael Delrickio, whose mob connections Eve planned to reveal; actress Gloria DuBarry, a symbol of morality--provided no one learns of her affair and abortion. Or maybe it was Eva's devoted supporters Nina Soloman and Dorothy Travers, who are more than just staff. Or Eve's stepson, mystery writer Paul Winthrop, who has a marked interest in Julia. Or, as the police think, Julia herself. (Sept.)
Loading...Product Details
- Pub. Date: May 1999
- Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
- Format: Mass Market Paperback, 521pp
- Sales Rank: 15,800
- ISBN-13: 9780553290783
- ISBN: 0553290789
- Edition Description: Reprint
Read an Excerpt
Somehow, using a combination of pride and terror, she managed to keep her head up and to choke back the nausea. It wasn't a nightmare. It wasn't a dark fantasy she would shake off at dawn. Yet, dreamlike, everything was happening in slow motion. She was fighting to push her way through a thick curtain of water beyond which she could see the faces of the people all around her. Their eyes were hungry; their mouths opened and closed as if they would swallow her whole. Their voices ebbed and flowed like the pounding of waves on rock. Stronger, more insistent, was her heart's jerky beat, a fierce tango inside her frozen body.Keep moving, keep moving, her brain commanded her trembling legs as firm hands pushed her through the crowd and out onto the courthouse steps. The glare of sunlight made her eyes tear, so she fumbled for her sunglasses. They would think she was crying. She couldn't allow them that dip into her emotions. Silence was her only shield.
She stumbled and felt a moment of panic. She could not fall. If she fell, the reporters, the curious, would leap on her, snarling and snapping and tearing like wild dogs over a rabbit. She had to stand upright, to stand behind her silence for a few yards. Eve had taught her that much.
Give them your brains, girl, never your guts.
Eve. She wanted to scream. To throw her hands up over her face and scream and scream until all the rage, the fear, the grief, emptied out of her.
Shouted questions assaulted her. Microphones stabbed at her face like deadly little darts as the news crews busily tapped the finale of the arraignment for murder of Julia Summers.
"Bitch!" shouted someone whose voice was harsh with hate and tears. "Coldhearted bitch."
She wanted to stop and scream back: How do you know what I am? How do you know what I feel?
But the door of the limo was open. She climbed in to be cocooned by cool air, shielded by tinted glass. The crowd surged forward, pressing against the barricades along the curb. Angry faces encircled her; vultures over a still-bleeding corpse. As the car glided away, she looked straight ahead, her hands fisted in her lap and her eyes mercifully dry.
She said nothing as her companion fixed her a drink. Two fingers of brandy. When she had taken the first sip, he spoke calmly, almost casually, in the voice she had come to love.
"Well, Julia, did you kill her?"
* * *
She was a legend. A product of time and talent and her own unrelenting ambition. Eve Benedict. Men thirty years her junior desired her. Women envied her. Studio heads courted her, knowing that in this day when movies were made by accountants, her name was solid gold. In a career that had spanned nearly fifty years, Eve Benedict had known the highs, and the lows, and used both to forge herself into what she wanted to be.
She did as she chose, personally and professionally. If a role interested her, she went after it with the same verve and ferocity she'd used to get her first part. If she desired a man, she snared him, discarding him only when she was done, and--she liked to brag--never with malice. All of her former lovers, and they were legion, remained friends. Or had the good sense to pretend to be.
At sixty-seven, Eve had maintained her magnificent body through discipline and the surgeon's art. Over a half century she had honed herself into a sharp blade. She had used both disappointment and triumph to temper that blade into a weapon that was feared and respected in the kingdom of Hollywood.
She had been a goddess. Now she was a queen with a keen mind and keen tongue. Few knew her heart. None knew her secrets.
"It's shit." Eve tossed the script onto the tiled floor of the solarium, gave it a solid kick, then paced. She moved as she always had, with a thin coat of dignity over a blaze of sensuality. "Everything I've read in the last two months has been shit."
Her agent, a round, soft-looking woman with a will of iron, shrugged and sipped her afternoon cocktail. "I told you it was trash, Eve, but you wanted to read it."
"You said trash." Eve took a cigarette from a Lalique dish and dug into the pockets of her slacks for a book of matches. "There's always something redeeming in trash. I've done plenty of trash and made it shine. This"--she kicked the script again with relish--"is shit."
Margaret Castle took another sip of vodka-laced grapefruit juice. "Right again. The miniseries--"
A snap of the head, a quick glance with eyes sharp as a scalpel. "You know how I detest that word."
Maggie reached for a piece of marzipan and popped it into her mouth. "Whatever you choose to call it, the part of Marilou is perfect for you. There hasn't been a tougher, more fascinating Southern belle since Scarlett."
Eve knew it, and had already decided to take the offer. But she didn't like to give in too quickly. It wasn't just a matter of pride, but a matter of image. "Three weeks location-shooting in Georgia," she muttered. "Fucking alligators and mosquitoes."
"Honey, your sexual partners are your business." And earned a quick snort of laughter. "They've cast Peter Jackson as Robert."
Eve's bright green eyes narrowed. "When did you hear that?"
"Over breakfast." Maggie smiled and settled deeper into the pastel cushions on the white wicker settee. "I thought you might be interested."
Calculating, still moving, Eve blew out a long stream of smoke. "He looks like this week's hunk, but he does excellent work. It might almost make running around in a swamp worthwhile."
Now that she had a nibble, Maggie reeled in her catch. "They're considering Justine Hunter for Marilou."
"That bimbo?" Eve began to puff and pace more rapidly. "She'd ruin the picture. She hasn't the talent or the brains to be Marilou. Did you see her in Midnight? The only thing that wasn't flat about her performance was her bustline. Jesus."
The reaction was exactly what Maggie had expected. "She did very well in Right of Way."
"That's because she was playing herself, an empty-headed slut. My God, Maggie, she's a disaster."
"The TV audience knows her name, and . . ." Maggie chose another piece of marzipan, examined it, smiled. "She's the right age for the part. Marilou is supposed to be in her mid-forties."
Eve whirled around. She stood in a patch of sunlight, the cigarette jutting from her fingers like a weapon. Magnificent, Maggie thought as she waited for the explosion. Eve Benedict was magnificent, with her sharp-featured face, those full red lips, the sleekly cropped ebony hair. Her body was a man's fantasy--long and limber, full-breasted. It was clad in a jewel-toned silk, her trademark.
Then she smiled, the famous lightning-quick smile that left the recipient breathless. Tossing back her head, she gave a long, appreciative laugh. "Dead center, Maggie. Goddammit, you know me too well."
Maggie crossed her plump legs. "After twenty-five years, I should."
Eve moved to the bar to pour herself a tall glass of juice from oranges fresh from her own trees. She added a generous splash of champagne. "Start working on the deal."
"I already have. This project is going to make you a rich woman."
"I am a rich woman." With a shrug, Eve crushed out her cigarette. "We both are."
"So, we'll be richer." She toasted Eve with her glass, drank, then rattled ice cubes. "Now, why don't you tell me why you really asked me out here today?"
Leaning back against the bar, Eve sipped. Diamonds glinted at her ears; her feet were bare. "You do know me too well. I've got another project in mind. One I've been thinking about for some time. I'll need your help with it."
Maggie arched one thin blond brow. "My help, not my opinion?"
"Your opinion's always welcome, Maggie. It's one of the few that is." She sat in a high-back wicker chair cushioned in scarlet. From there she could see her gardens, the meticulously tended blooms, the carefully trimmed hedges. Bright water fumed up in a marble fountain and glinted in its basin. Beyond was the pool, the guest house--an exact reproduction of a Tudor home from one of her most successful films. Behind a stand of palms were the tennis courts she used at least twice a week, a putting green she had lost interest in, a shooting range she had installed after the Manson murders twenty years before. There was an orange grove, a ten-car garage, a man-made lagoon, and a twenty-foot stone fence to close it all in.
She'd worked for every square inch of her estate in Beverly Hills. Just as she'd worked to turn a smoky-voiced sex symbol into a respected actress. There had been sacrifices, but she rarely thought of them. There had been pain. That was something she never forgot. She had clawed her way up a ladder slippery with sweat and blood--and had been at the top for a long time. But she was there alone.
"Tell me about the project," Maggie was saying. "I'll give you my opinion, and then my help."
"What project?"
Both women looked toward the doorway at the sound of the man's voice. It carried the faintest of British accents, like polish over fine wood, though the man had not lived in England for more than a decade in his thirty-five years. Paul Winthrop's home was southern California.
"You're late." But Eve was smiling easily and holding out both hands for him.
"Am I?" He kissed her hands first, then her cheek, finding them both as soft as rose petals. "Hello, gorgeous." He lifted her glass, sipped, and grinned. "Best damn oranges in the country. Hi, Maggie."
"Paul. Christ, you look more like your father every day. I could get you a screen test in a heartbeat."
He sipped again before handing the glass back to Eve. "I'm going to take you up on that one day--when hell freezes over."
He crossed to the bar, a tall, leanly built male with a hint of muscle beneath his loose shirt. His hair was the color of aged mahogany and was windswept from driving fast with the top of his convertible down. His face, which had been almost too pretty as a boy, had weathered--much to his relief. Eve studied it now, the long, straight nose, the hollowed cheeks, the deep blue eyes with their faint lines that were a woman's curse and a man's character. His mouth was quirked in a grin and was strong and beautifully shaped. It was a mouth she had fallen in love with twenty-five years before. His father's mouth.
"How is the old bastard?" she asked with affection.
"Enjoying his fifth wife, and the tables at Monte Carlo."
"He'll never learn. Women and gambling were always Rory's weaknesses."
Because he planned to work that evening, Paul sipped his juice straight. He'd interrupted his day for Eve, as he would have done for no one else. "Fortunately, he's always had uncanny luck with both."
Eve drummed her fingers on the arm of the chair. She'd been married to Rory Winthrop for a brief and tumultuous two years a quarter of a century before, and wasn't certain she agreed with his son's verdict. "How old is this one, thirty?"
"According to her press releases." Amused, Paul tilted his head as Eve snatched up another cigarette. "Come now, gorgeous, don't tell me you're jealous."
If anyone else had suggested it, she would have raked them clean to the bone. Now Eve merely shrugged.
"I hate to see him make a fool of himself. Besides, every time he takes the plunge, they run a list of his exes." A cloud of smoke veiled her face for a moment, then was whipped up into the current from the ceiling fan. "I detest seeing my name linked with his poorer choices."
"Ah, but yours shines the brightest." Paul lifted his glass in salute. "As it should."
"Always the right words at the right time." Pleased, Eve settled back. But her fingers moved restlessly on the arm of the chair. "The mark of the successful novelist. Which is one of the reasons I asked you here today."
"One of?"
"The other being that I don't see enough of you, Paul, when you're in the middle of one of your books." Again she held out a hand for his. "I might have been your stepmama for only a short time, but you're still my only son."
Touched, he brought her hand to his lips. "And you're still the only woman I love."
"Because you're too damn choosy." But Eve squeezed his fingers before she released them. "I didn't ask both of you here for sentiment. I need your professional advice." She took a slow drag on her cigarette, knowing the value of the dramatic timing. "I've decided to write my memoirs."
"Oh, Christ," was Maggie's first reaction, but Paul merely lifted a brow.
"Why?"
Only the sharpest of ears would have heard the hesitation. Eve always had her lines cold. "Having a lifetime achievement award thrust on me started me thinking."
"That was an honor, Eve," Maggie put in. "Not a kick in the pants."
"It was both," Eve said. "It was fitting to have my body of work honored, but my life--and my work--are far from finished. It did cause me to reflect on the fact that my fifty years in this business have been far from dull. I don't think even someone with Paul's imagination could dream up a more interesting story--with such varied characters." Her lips curved slowly, with malice as well as humor. "There will be some who won't be pleased to see their names and their little secrets in print."
"And there's nothing you like better than to stir the pot," Paul murmured.
"Nothing," Eve agreed. "And why not? The sauce sticks to the bottom and burns if it isn't stirred now and again. I intend to be frank, brutally so. I won't waste my time on a celebrity biography that reads like a press release or a fan letter. I need a writer who won't soften my words or exploit them. Someone who will put my story together as it is, not as some might want it to be." She caught the expression on Paul's face and laughed. "Don't worry, darling, I'm not asking you to take the job."
"I gather you have someone in mind." He took her glass to freshen her drink. "Is that why you sent the Robert Chambers bio over to me last week?"
Eve accepted the glass and smiled. "What did you think of it?"
He shrugged. "It was well done for its kind."
"Don't be a snob, darling." Amused, she gestured with her cigarette. "As I'm sure you're aware, the book received excellent reviews and stayed on the New York Times list for twenty weeks."
"Twenty-two," he corrected her, and made her grin.
"It was an interesting work, if one was into Robert's bravado, and machismo, but what I found most fascinating was that the author managed to ferret out a number of truths among the carefully crafted lies."
"Julia Summers," Maggie put in, debating hard and long over another piece of candy. "I saw her on Today when she was doing the promotion rounds last spring. Very cool, very attractive. There was a rumor that she and Robert were lovers."
"If they were, she maintained her objectivity." Eve made a circle in the air with her cigarette before crushing it out. "Her personal life isn't the issue."
"But yours will be," Paul reminded her. After setting his glass aside, he moved closer to her. "Eve, I don't like the idea of your opening yourself up. Whatever they say about sticks and stones, words leave scars, especially when they're tossed by a clever writer."
"You're absolutely right--that's why I intend for most of the words to be mine." She waved away his protest, impatiently, so that he saw her mind was already made up. "Paul, without getting on your literary hobby horse, what do you think of Julia Summers professionally?"
"She does what she does well enough. Maybe too well." The idea made him uneasy. "You don't need to expose yourself to public curiosity this way, Eve. You certainly don't need the money, or the publicity."
"My dear boy, I'm not doing this for the money or the publicity. I'm doing it as I do most things, for the satisfaction." Eve glanced toward her agent. She knew Maggie well enough to see that the wheels were already turning. "Call her agent," Eve said briefly. "Make the pitch. I'll give you a list of my requirements." She rose then to press a kiss to Paul's cheek. "Don't scowl. You have to trust that I know what I'm doing."
She walked with perfect poise to the bar to add more champagne to her glass, hoping she hadn't started a ball rolling that would ultimately flatten her.
loading...
Related EssentiaListsuiAction=GetRelatedListsByEanFromProductPage&page=List&pageType=list&ean=9780553290783&productCode=BK&maxCount=5&threshold=10
loading...
Fans of this BookuiAction=GetProfileBlurbsWithEANinFavorites&page=UserProfile&pageType=profile&eanInput=9780553290783
loading...
Hear our exclusive audio interview with Nora Roberts (11:41).